When my brother gave me Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, it felt like an unexpected but perfect gift. I already knew Elvis Costello through his sharp, angular new wave records, albums with a bite and urgency that matched the restless energy of youth. But I also knew him from a more surprising place: his duet with Burt Bacharach in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Together, they sang I’ll Never Fall in Love Again—a moment that was tongue-in-cheek in its setting, yet the words landed sincerely: “What do you get when you fall in love? / You only get lies and pain and sorrow.” That song lingered with me, and in a sense, it foreshadowed how Costello has always been a shape-shifter—moving between irony and intimacy, between spectacle and sincerity.
Secret, Profane & Sugarcane felt like the natural extension of that insight. Here was Costello stripped down, sitting not in the neon of a club but on a porch, banjo and fiddle at his side, his voice threading through the language of folk and Americana. It was as if he had entered the great American songbook and found his own way of writing in its margins.
Certain tracks struck chords in me that have only grown louder with time. In Complicated Shadows, he warns, “You can’t conceal it, once you’ve felt it burning bright.” That lyric names the way choices and consequences lodge in our psyche. Carl Jung spoke of the “shadow” as the part of ourselves we repress or deny—yet it still shapes us. Shadows are not simply darkness but the concealed forces within, waiting for acknowledgment. Costello, in song, captures that psychological truth: what burns within us eventually shows itself, and our humanity lies not in avoiding the shadow but in facing it.
Then there is I Dreamed of My Old Lover. He sings, “She was standing by my bedside, in her long, white gown.” That lyric lands with unusual force for me. My wife wore a long white dress too, a hastily purchased but beautiful summer gown of lace on our wedding day. In the sunset of that June evening, she was never more radiant. The song brings that vision back, not as a photograph but as a dream—half real, half spectral. For me, the lyric blurs past and present, waking and dreaming, love and loss. Søren Kierkegaard once wrote that “recollection is the only reality,” that memory transforms life into something enduring even as the present slips away. The gown lives on now more in dream than in fabric, a reminder that love continues to visit us, even after its departure.
But the song that resonates most deeply in this chapter of my life is Changing Partners. “We were waltzing together to a dreamy melody.” A simple lyric, but one that captures the fragile dance of intimacy. In my post-COVID, post-divorce life, the waltz is no longer romantic fantasy—it is survival. Kierkegaard spoke of repetition as the test of existence: the question of whether we can begin again when life disrupts us. Each time the music changes, we are asked to step once more into rhythm, even if our partner is unfamiliar. There is melancholy in this truth, but also resilience: the body remembers how to move, how to begin again, even after loss.
I often think of National Ransom, the album that followed, as part two of the same narrative. Where Secret, Profane & Sugarcane turns its gaze inward, National Ransom expands outward into history and spectacle, but the continuity between them feels deliberate. They are both records of impermanence, each asking us to sit with the crooked lines of our lives. “It’s a crooked line, but it still joins up,” Costello sings. That lyric echoes Heraclitus, who wrote that “the way up and the way down are one and the same.” The crookedness is not a flaw but the very condition of our becoming. To live is to walk a line that is never straight, yet still whole.
For me, Secret, Profane & Sugarcane is more than an album—it is a companion text, a mirror held up to the complicated intersections of my own life. It reflects the shadows I’ve walked through, the dreams that still visit me, the partners I’ve lost, and the crooked line I continue to follow. And curiously, it all circles back to that moment in a comedy film when Costello sang I’ll Never Fall in Love Again. From irony to intimacy, from new wave to Americana, his voice has threaded through the seasons of my life, reminding me that change itself is the most constant partner we will ever know.